16 Pentecost
John 8:21-30
Today’s text begins with a bit of déjà vu. Jesus tells the religious leaders that he is going away, and that they will search for him. But where he is going they cannot come.
Sound familiar? It should. It is almost the exact thing Jesus said earlier, quite possibly that same day, when the Pharisees and priests sent the temple police to arrest him (7:32-36) ‘You will search for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.’ On that occasion those listening wondered what he was talking about. They decided that perhaps he was saying that he was going out into the diaspora, among the Greek cities.
Now Jesus has said almost the same thing again. The game of hide and seek with the religious leaders continues. And once more, Jesus eludes them. They miss the point and go off in entirely the wrong direction. This time they are thinking not that Jesus is going to leave Judea and Galilee and go off into the Greek cities, but that he is going to take his own life.
Jesus talks to the religious leaders, but they fail to hear what he is saying. In fact, almost everything he says they misunderstand, and that by a wide margin.
The reaction of the Pharisees and priests to Jesus’ words is a sign of how this conversation is going.
Have you ever had a discussion with someone that you just couldn’t get through to? No matter how hard you tried to explain something they just could not or would not accept what you were saying. At some point, exasperated, you give up. You wondered why you even bothered. You may as well have been speaking to a brick wall.
This is the situation Jesus finds himself in in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus, once again, is telling the Pharisees and the other religious leaders who he is. He has already told them he is the messianic light of the world prophesied in Isaiah (verse 12). He has told them that if they knew him, then they also knew the Father (verse 19). Now he says that he is ‘from above’ and is not of this world (verse 23). Finally, he says that to find forgiveness of sins they must believe that he is the ‘I am’ (verse 24), referring to the name God gave Moses when he asked his name (Exodus 3:14,15). On top of all the other things Jesus has done and said, it is hard to imagine how he could have been any clearer about who he is. He is the promised Messiah. More than that, he is God himself. He is the great I AM.
And how do the Pharisees and other religious leaders respond to this series of increasingly blunt statement from Jesus about who he is?
They ask him: ‘Who are you?’
Can you imagine that? After Jesus tells them as plainly as he can who he is, and in more than one way, they respond by asking him who he is.
How else could Jesus have said it? At this point he is clearly exasperated.
So he simply says: ‘Why to I bother to speak to you at all?’ (verse 25)
Jesus admits that he seems to be wasting his time with them.
Yet Jesus does continue to speak. He tells them he has much to say. And much of it they will not like. He has much to condemn in what he sees and hears from them.
Finally, he tells them that they will eventually understand who he is. ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realise that I AM,’ he tells them.
It is the second time in this text that Jesus says that he is the ‘I am.’ Our English translations often translate his words as ‘I am he’ so that they make more grammatical sense. But they were just as awkward in John’s Greek, where Jesus simply says ‘ego eimi’ (‘I am’). The awkwardness of the construction is intentional. Jesus did not forget to finish his sentence. He is making the strongest and clearest claim possible to being God. For ‘I am’ was the name God gave to Moses when Moses asked God for his name.
And this second time Jesus makes the claim to be ‘I am’ in our text he does do with reference to being ‘lifted up from the earth’ by his questioners.
But this statement about being lifted up from the earth has a history in John’s Gospel. Jesus has said this before. He said this to Nicodemus. And we know from the end of the last chapter that Nicodemus is there among the Pharisees who are questioning Jesus.
Jesus had told Nicodemus, when he came to him at night, that, ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life’ (John 3:14,15). It was an image from the wanderings of the people of Israel in the wilderness, which was being celebrated at the Feast of Booths, which Jesus was attending when he said these words. So the allusion to Moses and the serpent in the wilderness makes sense in this context.
But it is also a reminder to Nicodemus that once Jesus is lifted up on the cross, there would be no more doubt about who he was. And of course, we read at the end of John’s Gospel, when Nicodemus makes his third appearance, that after Jesus is lifted up from the earth on the cross, he finally comes forward as a follower of Jesus. The words Jesus spoke about showing everyone that he is the Messiah when he is lifted up from the earth would have stuck in Nicodemus’ mind.
When Nicodemus sees Jesus on the cross, he knows.
There is no more doubt.
There is no more hesitation.
Even though Jesus’ own disciples are in hiding and the movement seems lost, Nicodemus comes forward publicly as a follower of Jesus.
But Nicodemus was not the only person in the crowd that day. There were many other Pharisees and religious leaders with him. They were experts in the scriptures. They were the ones who should have understood what Jesus was saying. They should have understood who Jesus was. But Jesus warns them that by the time they see the truth, it would be too late. They would ‘die in their sins because they did not believe that Jesus was the great I AM, God in flesh come to them.
For Jesus if must have been frustrating explaining over and over to the religious experts who he was. But he was not wasting his time. There were others in the crowd who were listening. And we are told that many of them understood and believed.
Jesus tells us plainly who he is. He tells us plainly that he is the light of the world. He tells us plainly that only in him do we find forgiveness of sins and peace with God.
The question for each of us is this: Are we listening? Do we believe him? Or, like the Pharisees, are we still asking Jesus: ‘Who are you?’
Jesus tells us that not only is he the promised Messiah, the light of the world, but he is also the I AM, the creator of all. And he has indeed been lifted up on the cross for everyone to see.
He is not hiding. He is not keeping his identity a secret.
As John told us as the beginning of his Gospel; God, the true light of the world, has come to dwell among us.
So – Are we listening? Are our eyes open?
Amen.
Pastor Mark Worthing.
Port Macquarie.